Notebook

By Richard Preston

12:01AM BST 28 Oct 2004

Even Edwardians suffered from healthy living

Anyone reading Judith Woods's article in this paper yesterday about organic food will have recognised the creeping guilt that supermarkets want us to feel if we don't make sure that every last ingredient we buy has the blessing of the Soil Association. My own favourite is organic salt - still, allegedly, a killer, but a nicely brought up one.

This week, a branch of Asda has been fined £5,000 for claiming that mangoes have antioxidant properties that can help fight cancer. Making a fuss about this seems surprising, given that the label of virtually every food in the kitchen implores us to believe that the contents were raised with love and are thoroughly life-enhancing. It's only odd that we're still allowed to smuggle a bag of fruit out of a supermarket without a leaflet or a lecture to accompany it.

When did these neuroses about food begin? I've just discovered, while reading VS Pritchett's memoir of his Edwardian childhood, A Cab at the Door, that the high street retailing of mind and body-improving ingredients goes back at least a century. Pritchett remembers, with no sense of pleasure, being taken to Eustace Miles's New Food Restaurant near Charing Cross, where "energising breads and hygienic omelettes" were served.

The same Eustace Miles appears in EM Forster's Howards End (1910), in which Margaret Schlegel refers dismissively to his restaurant: "It's all proteids and body-buildings, and people come up to you and beg your pardon, but you have such a beautiful aura."

Miles appears to have been Britain's answer to the Kellogg brothers, who turned an interest in detoxifying the colon into a global cereals empire. An amateur athlete - he was a world champion at rackets and real tennis - he co-wrote sporting books and a satirical annual with the novelist EF Benson, a school friend from Marlborough. His Chandos Street restaurant was a showcase for his wife Dorothy's wretchedly dull but good-for-you recipes, but he also had lecture rooms, an advice bureau, a "physical school" and a publishing business, through which he could disseminate his views on food reform, fitness, concentration and the sporting spirit. He never did become a Kellogg, but at the peak of his success, in the late Twenties, he had health food shops across London and two more restaurants, in Carshalton and Chelsea. He sounds worth a screenplay, or a small biography at least.

Cherie Blair Booth's reference to "Allerednic" syndrome - Cinderella spelt backwards - in a speech to businesswomen in Detroit is a nice joke, but an old one. She'll have heard it first when she and Mr Blair hosted a "millennium lecture" in January 1999 given by Jonathan Gershuny, a professor of sociology at Essex University. He coined the term to describe women who, on marrying, are reduced from princesses to scullery maids, rather than the other way round.

Mrs Blair's point was that she had narrowly avoided being cast as an Allerednic after she married; instead, she was the breadwinner and Tony - that's "y-not?" backwards - did the housework and looked after the children. All very enlightened, but sneering at scullery maiding - in other words, the shopping, cleaning, cooking and child care with which most people outside Downing Street have to fill their free time - doesn't do either of them a favour.

As well as being a remarkably brave and effective fighting force since 1715, the soldiers of the Black Watch find themselves in the vanguard of fashion this autumn. For as the regiment takes its distinctive pompom-topped berets north towards Baghdad, the smartest Notting Hill ladies can also be seen displaying pompom chic - though theirs are made by the Italian fashion label Marni and are worn dangling from the handbag or the belt. And where Marni leads, I'm told, the others follow.